The Activity of Dying: Death And Art Merge As A Performance Piece

Cheek to Cheek with ‘Death’. Its not everyday you have a moment to contemplate the activity of dying and more importantly how it effects living. However a couple of weeks a go I was catalysed on a journey to see beyond my own foolishness in living whilst relating to dying.

The situation arose in quite an unusual way, I had over the years, become very familiar with death, through my work as an artist, medium and psychic healer; helping people pass in to Source or Heaven after living a full life, or after being weakened in their fight of major illness, or in helping the souls of the dead reconnect to their loved ones after passing. This all became small talk when two weeks ago, I found myself in the presence of a convicted murderer of three men. He and his girlfriend were talking through my services as a psychic healer at a spiritual retreat.

The confrontation with Death wasn’t bought about by anything that was said or done between us, it was bought about through a vision I had in the man’s presence when I saw his intention (of the past) to kill.

I caught a glimpse in to the soul of the man, with my right eye clairvoyant perception. I saw him knifing through a mans scalp, from the forehead to the left ear, with the intention to cut up and to kill. I tried to focus on the lady ignoring the images that were streaming through my consciousness as the couple debated if the environment we were sitting in was too haunted or not for them to stay!

I decided to give them the freedom to form their own relationship with the historic building and suggested they go for a drive. An hour later I got a phone call, from the man explaining, ‘sorry we have decided we wont be staying’. A sense of confusion and relief began to embody me, as I suddenly stepped in to the full feelings of the experience and my soul seemed to jump beyond my body, as it expanded in to a state of shock.

The difference to the past visions, and the vision I had with the man was in the intention behind the action and the real-ity of the vision. ‘Seeing’ through human eyes holds us to so much illusion, we don’t really know what we are experiencing, there is always a question around the emotive’s of the drama, the depth of experience, or whether deception’s hand plays a role, we are always left with a question of how much of our life is real?

However seeing clairvoyantly is seeing with all your senses, all your emotions; the sound, the vividness of pain, its seeing on the level of ‘knowing’. I couldn’t logically tell you where my boundary of peace to shock lies when working with death, I just know the intention to hurt another human so deeply, is terribly unforgiving in its nature. I sensed it was this individual’s (the murderers) experience of evilness that lead him back to his spirituality. As underneath it all he too was probably shocked at what he had done. He tells people he has found God, yet there is a human line when evil is too evil, and a few person finds their light. This seems to be different for all, like Anne Frank says, ‘Despite everything I still believe all people are good at heart’. This is the same with suffering, there is a channel of pain I call ‘The Void’ which is too big, too dark, ultimately the sense of aloneness and falling catalyses a person to either go psychotic or to find their inner God, their inner light, as we are of light in the depths of our heart.

Vision and clairvoyance is there to help us, to protect us and also to teach us, its the holographic universe in clear panoramic high definition vision, enabling us to fully experience Life with all our senses and with a clear dialogue to collective consciousness.

So hearing the above you will understand that the timely occasion for Eleanor Lindsay Fynn to connect with me about a performance at the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, 17 October surrounding the subject of ‘The four corners of Death’ in respect to the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying was highly relevant. She suggested I play a role of ‘Accepting Life, Accepting Death’ asking me how I related to Death. I said ‘Through Death there is Life’, I went on to think about the way I relate to living, questioning my deepest fears.

The performance of ‘The Four Corners of Death’ at the Truman Brewery challenged me to look at myself from a place of past, present and future. The art work at the Truman Brewery was of a high standard, Eleanor had worked with Greek Tragedy masks and iconography surrounding living and dying. She had invited death dancers to seduce the audience in to looking at death, with other performers acting out the bardo states of existence. The black nature of death is seductive, the void of fear, of darkness, of shadow, but how do we find our light amongst it?

I decided to dialogue within my role in the performance in how I relate to life, I drew with energy, showing and mapping my perception, my ability to work with air and spaces in between life, giving a landscape to energy and sculpture to the energy fields of the human body and air space. I noticed people watching me ‘see’ beyond their human sight and remembered that I had arrived at a destiny I had drawn a path into with full intention.

I related to death beyond ‘accepting life, accepting death’, as a psychic healer I was in fact living beyond life, taking away peoples burdens in our vulnerable states, with illness, depression and anxiety. I was attempting to make the journey of life light, helping people live without the trauma of life, I was on earth to sooth people, to help them carry on, to ease their burdens so that they could be free to keep going, to break through the oppressions and to find peace beyond the reality that embodied them.

In noticing how extremely hard I was working at offering people this lighter reality, I noticed a fear inside myself; not so much the fear of the trauma of death but a fear in the risk of living. The commitment to the journey of life is riddled with the possibility of major pain, entrapment, disablement, poverty, anxiety, fear, insecurity. I started to realise I had an underlying agenda in surviving, in cushioning myself and others using every ounce of strength I had so as to not feel the lower vibrations of painful experience. This investment, seemed to be a form of insurance, however I was working so hard at it that I was perhaps not fully experiencing the fullness of life.

I was living safely and securely in a wrap of insured life. This was driven from a place of survival, a place of challenge. I had become professional at light living yet I had become pretty risk free in manifesting some of my more ambitious dreams. I was struggling to have all my tools to create the life I wanted. Part of this, I realised was through a need to accept that finance is a creative tool, just as magenta and citrus yellow at key note colours in my painting pallet.

I had over the years learnt that that my strength was with the relationship I had to passionate artists and curators who had the same interests as me in consciousness, spirituality, philosophy, creativity and psychology. I was finding a pathway of people whom had understood art to be a channel for life and the rhetoric of living. I was living a shabby chic bohemian existence that needed re-booting, my dance with death was kick starting me to shift up a gear, to live without the fear of risk or failure, to live with an attempt at success. I found that old trusting statement, in that most peoples fears are of the largeness of themselves, I was no different. What is your deepest fear of Life?

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” Marianne Williamson

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